‘Street Thief? (9 p.m. Thursday, A&E) is an intriguing 2-hour film that asks viewers, right off the bat, to accept a central premise that is pretty hard to believe: Tthat a professional thief would allow documentary filmmakers to follow him around for months on end and witness him using all the tricks of his trade.
The movie’s gimmick is to present itself as a documentary about a Chicago burglar named Kaspar Carr, but shouldn’t the thief’s first name be a clue about whether he’s real or not?
In any case, the filmmakers behind “Street Thief” have certainly made a movie that does, indeed, look a lot like a real documentary about a burglar — the dialogue, jagged camera work and even the occasional slow patches feel like authentic slices of cinema verite.
Carr is a boastful, foul-mouthed solo thief, and refuses the filmmakers’ attempts to draw him out of his shell. He has no “sob story” to share;, there’s no fatal flaw that made him want to steal, he says.
He just recalls his grandmother walking into a grocery store with him on Halloween when he was young — and instead of waiting for an employee to hand out one treat, the grandmother scooped entire boxes of candy into her purse. Nobody noticed, nothing happened, and that was that — Carr’s career choice was made.
Carr works the ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago, targeting mom and pop stores and non-chain grocery stores, but his biggest score involves an attempt to grab the weekend receipts of a suburban movie theater.
Clearly the filmmakers did their homework on how career thieves actually go about their jobs, and though Carr is not presented as a hero or even an admirable guy, his techniques and extensive planning are depicted with fascinating accuracy. The movie picks up steam in its second half, which attempts to stray into thriller territory, but much of that momentum is squandered in on an inconclusive ending. Some interesting plot threads emerge, only to go nowhere (one hunting sequence seems completely out of place). On the other hand, Carr’s story is intercut with taped interviews of another professional thief who’s in prison, and those sequences are taut and well-acted. The performances throughout are, in fact, admirably natural.
Whatever its flaws — and it does have the variable energy and skill levels of a first-time feature — “Street Thief” kept me wondering until the end.
Not about whether Carr was real, but about where the story would end up. Director Malik Bader has depicted the alleyways and neighborhoods of Chicago with an unsentimental and compelling eye, and if “Street Thief” is not an instant classic, it’s certainly an interesting effort.
